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DART has some nice coverage and all, but light rail at that large of a distance doesn't work, in my opinion. A subway/heavy rail system would though. Light rail runs too slow for someone in say, Plano, to want to go to DFW or Love Field airports. The only thing it saves is money. DFW is easier to drive around.

Yes, travelers wanting to go from Plano to DFW Airport would be better off taking the Cotton Belt commuter rail. The Orange Line to DFW will be better at connecting downtown Dallas and Las Colinas to the airport.

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I worked for an apartment developer at one point that involved itself in the D.C. area. I examined these areas for acquisitions and development. And yeah...I read into your comments in precisely the same way that KinkaidAlum did. And frankly, your revised examples still kind of suck or are insignificant in the grander scheme of things.

That's fine. Both of you misunderstood my comments and I didn't revise anything. I lived in one of the developments on Morgan Blvd. Look into it. Look what's around it. Same with Largo. Same thing with Addison Road-Seat Pleasant. Same thing With Cheverly. Same thing with Shady Grove. I'm not comparing HRT to LRT. I'm saying that both are basically commuter systems.

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Yes, travelers wanting to go from Plano to DFW Airport would be better off taking the Cotton Belt commuter rail. The Orange Line to DFW will be better at connecting downtown Dallas and Las Colinas to the airport.

When is this suppose to be completed? What would someone in South Dallas do (along the Red or Blue line) take to get to DFW Airport? It's much quicker to take 408 straight up to 183 instead of the rail, which only saves money.

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Again, I don't know the Dallas Metro or its rail line enough to say much about it, but you would figure another line would be necessary at some point.

Makes me wonder what they think of OUR light rail routes.

The DART D2 project is supposed to relieve rail traffic through downtown. The current transit mall only has capacity for 10 minute headways on 4 lines (Red, Blue, Green, Orange), each way. Because all lines travel through downtown Dallas, any additional frequency or rail expansion requires a second alignment (and partial subway). But because of its high cost ($380-$650 million) it's on hold for now. By increasing headways to 15 minutes and pushing the project back to 2018, DART is able to use the partial funds designated for D2 to build the DFW and South Dallas extensions first.

Edited August 11, 2010 by dfwcre8tive

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When is this suppose to be completed? What would someone in South Dallas do (along the Red or Blue line) take to get to DFW Airport? It's much quicker to take 408 straight up to 183 instead of the rail, which only saves money.

The aim is to start it in 2013, but I don't think that's going to happen. There's no funding for the project, so DART and the Regional Transportation Council have been trying to create a public-private partnership with interested parties. More info: http://www.dart.org/cottonbeltppp/

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Yes, travelers wanting to go from Plano to DFW Airport would be better off taking the Cotton Belt commuter rail. The Orange Line to DFW will be better at connecting downtown Dallas and Las Colinas to the airport.

Exactly - the current system is not designed to take passengers from Plano to DFW, but the line will serve the center city well, along with Las Colinas. Passengers from Plano will at least initially have the option to take the longer route through downtown until the Cotton Belt line is running

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I'm impressed by DART's can do attitude, and I mean that dead seriously, but who are the people that are going to be riding this system that seems to be generally in the middle of nowhere based on the pics? You seriously can't hope that TOD's just spring along the rail over time?

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I'm impressed by DART's can do attitude, and I mean that dead seriously, but who are the people that are going to be riding this system that seems to be generally in the middle of nowhere based on the pics? You seriously can't hope that TOD's just spring along the rail over time?

The Orange Line connects Irving to downtown Dallas and should see high ridership. Once the line and its extensions are complete in 2014, it will connect DFW Airport to Las Colinas, North Lake College, the University of Dallas, Love Field, Southwestern Medical District and Downtown Dallas. The line will also include same-seat service to Plano during peak times.

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The Orange Line connects Irving to downtown Dallas and should see high ridership. Once the line and its extensions are complete in 2014, it will connect DFW Airport to Las Colinas, North Lake College, the University of Dallas, Love Field, Southwestern Medical District and Downtown Dallas. The line will also include same-seat service to Plano during peak times.

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Yea but how will people get to the rail? This essentially seems like a Park&Ride rail system.

Outside of the urban districts, DART operates as a Park & Ride system; that's the reason for the large commuter parking lots. Las Colinas Urban Center Station will have a direct connection to the Las Colinas APT.

After nearly 30 years – and $7.4 billion in sales taxes collected – Texas' most ambitious experiment with public transit enters a new era Monday, when Dallas Area Rapid Transit trains begin running full-time on the new Green Line from southern Dallas all the way north to Carrollton.

The new line makes DART the largest light-rail system in the United States, an accomplishment that comes just a generation after the agency's creation. With larger trains, a longer route and stops at two of Dallas' largest medical centers, the $1.8 billion Green Line is more than just big: It begins to deliver on three decades of promises to make rail relevant throughout its service area.

"The Green Line really starts to complete the rail service" as envisioned in the 1980s, said DART president Gary Thomas, who has overseen the agency for nearly a decade. By connecting southeast Dallas, the Parkland hospital district, Love Field and beyond, "it really starts to complete the system."

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Ha Ha Ha, I laugh in the face of your newly opened rail line. Not only have Houstonians outwitted Dallas but we've outwitted the world by focusing most of our transportation dollars on roads. What fools you and the rest of the world are for investing soooooo much money on rail when buses are so much cheaper. As gas prices continue to rise as I have predicted for some time now, you will learn to regret your expansive rail systems as more people riding trains will cut into oil company profits, thus hurting Texas' economy. The citizens of Dallas must not love the great state of Texas.

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Ha Ha Ha, I laugh in the face of your newly opened rail line. Not only have Houstonians outwitted Dallas but we've outwitted the world by focusing most of our transportation dollars on roads. What fools you and the rest of the world are for investing soooooo much money on rail when buses are so much cheaper. As gas prices continue to rise as I have predicted for some time now, you will learn to regret your expansive rail systems as more people riding trains will cut into oil company profits, thus hurting Texas' economy. The citizens of Dallas must not love the great state of Texas.

I am jealous and of course joking. Congratulations Dallas.

it is all fine and good of that is where Dallas wants to put money, but lets be honest.....their ridership per mile is already very low and anyone that thinks traffic in Houston is any worse than in dallas is fooling themselves

also in many places and especially dallas the downtown area is not the area of job growth......you can't put Alliance Airport, the raceway, DFW airport, or many other things that are driving growth in downtown dallas.......just like you can't put the port of Houston right downtown......so spending billions on rail lines designed to carry people all downtown or centered on downtown is not exactly my idea of genius

Houston has much better ridership per mile, that single line hits just about as much or more major things than all of the dallas lines combined......2 universities, major med center, major sports venue, zoo, museum district, and downtown

sadly I fear Houston is going to go down the same path as dallas in the future though and start running lines to "where the people are" when the reality is half of those people might drive opposite of traffic to get to work in the morning

one thing I think Houston may do correctly is "heavy rail".......these should come in from Katy or Sugarland ect and they should go at least 10 miles between stops and they should move at 70MPH+.......another issue I see with a lot of public transport is they try and turn a rail line into a bus route stopping every 2 miles for 3 to 5 minutes at a time......you spend more time stopped than actually getting to where you go and the reality is that a single line or even a few lines are not going to serve to catch tons of people making bunches of stops.....they will best serve people by stopping at large parking lots and them hauling A down the tracks and making time for long stretches before they stop to drop off and pick up at another centralized lot/bus drop off

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^^There was an interesting article posted in the DMN a couple of days ago:

Study shows most Dallas-area jobs not inaccessible by transit

Meanwhile, he said, the agency is still counting on a boom from its 15 years of investing in rail stations. Each new station, he said, will one day welcome new residents and workplaces alike, giving more workers an easier link to jobs.

“That hasn’t happened as quickly as we would have liked it to,” he said.

Dallas and its suburbs may form one of the busiest job centers in America, but when it comes to using transit to link workers to workplaces, commuters here are largely out of luck.

More than four of every five jobs in North Texas are inaccessible by public transportation for the typical commuter, according to a first-of-its-kind study by the Brookings Institution in Washington to be released Thursday morning.

In addition, more than half of the Dallas-area’s working-age population lives too far from the nearest transit stop to make it a realistic option for getting to work, the report showed.

Together, those two factors put the Dallas metropolitan area 89th out of America’s top 100 urban areas when it comes to linking workers to jobs by transit. Among the top 10 metro areas, only Miami scored worse.

The study suggests that North Texas has two big obstacles in creating a network of buses and trains that can link jobs to workers.

To begin with, the Dallas area covers a lot of land. At more than 1,400 square miles, it’s about 10 percent bigger than the Houston metro area and nearly five times as large as the Austin area, both areas that do a better job of linking jobs to workers by transit.

Unlike those areas, North Texas has no single transit authority that must provide for the entire region. Instead, each of its three agencies — Dallas Area Rapid Transit, The T in Fort Worth, and the Denton County Transportation Authority — provides service only within its own jurisdiction. Large areas are left without any transit service.

That helps explain why only 46 percent of working-age residents of the Dallas metro area live close to a transit stop, according to the report.

DART officials said Wednesday that the study overlooks how good a job the agency does in linking jobs to workers in its service area.

“DART is configured around 13 member cities, and we don’t provide services outside of that area,” Vice President Todd Plesko said. “But within those 13 cities, we provide accessibility to well over 90 percent of the jobs located there.”

Grading the region

The study’s co-author, Adie Tomer, said the Brookings research did not grade individual agencies on their performance. Instead, the research looks at how well urban areas have created transit options for their workers.

In North Texas as a whole, the answer is not very well. And the relatively sparse geographic coverage provided by DART and its two smaller counterparts is only part of the reason.

The share of jobs a typical commuter can reach by transit is much smaller here than elsewhere. That’s true in the area’s biggest cities as well as in its suburbs, the report showed.

In metro Houston, for instance, 30 percent of the region’s jobs are accessible by transit, compared with 19 percent in the Dallas area.

That’s true in part because Dallas-area jobs are more spread out than just about anywhere else in America. A 2009 study, also by Brookings, showed that 67 percent of all jobs in the Dallas metro area were located more than 10 miles from the downtown, a bigger share than anywhere in the U.S. besides Detroit and Los Angeles.

“Dallas faces really high levels of what we call job sprawl,” Tomer said. “That’s not conducive to providing transit service to people who want to get to work.”

But other areas with similar challenges have done much better at keeping transit an option for their workers, according to the report’s findings.

In Los Angeles, where jobs are more spread out than in Dallas, transit agencies have responded by locating rail or bus stops in nearly every neighborhood. Ninety-six percent of working-age residents live within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop, the report showed.

Houston has tackled the problem differently. Residents there are slightly less likely to live near a transit stop than in the Dallas area. But Houston has ensured many more jobs are located near transit — which, Tomer said, is more important for commuters weighing whether to take transit.

“In Houston, the transit service is better coordinated with its housing and jobs,” Tomer said. “Simply put, they are doing a better job coordinating their development patterns with their infrastructure provision.”

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it is all fine and good of that is where Dallas wants to put money, but lets be honest.....their ridership per mile is already very low and anyone that thinks traffic in Houston is any worse than in dallas is fooling themselves

also in many places and especially dallas the downtown area is not the area of job growth......you can't put Alliance Airport, the raceway, DFW airport, or many other things that are driving growth in downtown dallas.......just like you can't put the port of Houston right downtown......so spending billions on rail lines designed to carry people all downtown or centered on downtown is not exactly my idea of genius

Houston has much better ridership per mile, that single line hits just about as much or more major things than all of the dallas lines combined......2 universities, major med center, major sports venue, zoo, museum district, and downtown

sadly I fear Houston is going to go down the same path as dallas in the future though and start running lines to "where the people are" when the reality is half of those people might drive opposite of traffic to get to work in the morning

one thing I think Houston may do correctly is "heavy rail".......these should come in from Katy or Sugarland ect and they should go at least 10 miles between stops and they should move at 70MPH+.......another issue I see with a lot of public transport is they try and turn a rail line into a bus route stopping every 2 miles for 3 to 5 minutes at a time......you spend more time stopped than actually getting to where you go and the reality is that a single line or even a few lines are not going to serve to catch tons of people making bunches of stops.....they will best serve people by stopping at large parking lots and them hauling A down the tracks and making time for long stretches before they stop to drop off and pick up at another centralized lot/bus drop off

You bring up quite a few good points and I agree with most of them.

Dallas traffic isn't that big of a deal, and the post that Trae put up (but didn't really comment on), brings up the point nicely, but I don't think it is a "mistake" to put the lines "where the people are".

While I'm not familiar enough with Dallas as a whole, I know in Houston "where the people are" and where the lines are going into, are going to be insanely congested over the next couple of decades making rail that much more efficient for people there.

There are portions of the current rail system (Med center, Reliant) is consistent with time, but the cars around it are only moving at a snail's pace. I've personally been stuck in Reliant traffic and watched 3 trains crammed full of people fly by while I had a chance to casually (and ineffectually, mind you) play angry birds in my car.

Traffic may not seem bad now, but it WILL get worse in the future.

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Dallas traffic isn't that big of a deal, and the post that Trae put up (but didn't really comment on), brings up the point nicely, but I don't think it is a "mistake" to put the lines "where the people are".

While I'm not familiar enough with Dallas as a whole, I know in Houston "where the people are" and where the lines are going into, are going to be insanely congested over the next couple of decades making rail that much more efficient for people there.

There are portions of the current rail system (Med center, Reliant) is consistent with time, but the cars around it are only moving at a snail's pace. I've personally been stuck in Reliant traffic and watched 3 trains crammed full of people fly by while I had a chance to casually (and ineffectually, mind you) play angry birds in my car.

Traffic may not seem bad now, but it WILL get worse in the future.

I'll say this, Dallas traffic IS a big deal. Maybe not as much ten years ago, but with all the growth here, traffic really sucks. It is VERY multinodal, unlike Houston. You pretty much know which freeways will be backed up at which time and what direction in Houston. In DFW, they have random bottlenecks all over the place, because the jobs are so spread out. Once the Orange Line opens, it'll help, because Las Colinas and the DFW Airport area will finally be connected. There are so many cities with a competing interest, that it makes a regional system hard to do. It's easier for light rail to connect the inner loop areas of Houston, and just have commuter rail bring the suburbs into the city. Dallas used light rail to do both.

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one thing I think Houston may do correctly is "heavy rail".......these should come in from Katy or Sugarland ect and they should go at least 10 miles between stops and they should move at 70MPH+.......another issue I see with a lot of public transport is they try and turn a rail line into a bus route stopping every 2 miles for 3 to 5 minutes at a time......you spend more time stopped than actually getting to where you go and the reality is that a single line or even a few lines are not going to serve to catch tons of people making bunches of stops.....they will best serve people by stopping at large parking lots and them hauling A down the tracks and making time for long stretches before they stop to drop off and pick up at another centralized lot/bus drop off

You could do both express and local service with a single rail line using sidings at each station. It requires some coordination as the locals will need to be in a siding when the express comes through but railroads like UP and CSX do this all the time and have for years.

Greeting the Denton County Transportation Authority’s long-awaited passenger rail line Saturday were public officials and hundreds of area residents — young and old — eager for their first taste of the new connection to Carrollton and beyond.

The Rock n’ Rail celebration featured train rides, musical performances and vendors at each of the five DCTA depots. Milling about the Downtown Denton Transit Center were Mayor Mark Burroughs, U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville, and state Rep. Myra Crownover, R-Denton, among other area officials.

“There is no downside,” Denton resident Kelly Pound said as she walked to the downtown station.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The historical information in this story was supplied through the Denton County Historical Museum and in a piece written by longtime resident and historian Mike Cochran.

Some of those who climb aboard the A-train for one of its long-awaited inaugural runs will no doubt believe they are local trendsetters, riding the crest of a wave of change brought about by growing traffic congestion, rising fuel costs and worsening air quality.

While the A-train will provide an alternative way for residents to get to work or attend an event, the idea of a commuter rail line is nothing new.

The plan for today’s A-train service won voter approval in 2003, but historians and even some longtime residents can testify that the idea for this type of service between Denton and the Dallas area dates back well beyond that date.

Dallas can begin building the first leg of what city officials hope will be a robust streetcar line linking downtown Dallas and Oak Cliff, now that the $35 million project has cleared its federal environmental hurdles.

The Federal Transit Authority issued a “finding of no significant impact” last week, the North Central Texas Council of Governments announced Tuesday.

The finding, necessary for construction to begin, means crews could begin work as soon as March. The line could be operational as early as December 2013, DART spokesman Morgan Lyons said last week.

...

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Now that most of the system is built (a few key remaining projects are nearing completion), DART needs to shift its attention from being a Builder (engineers & construction managers) to being an Operator (customer service & service optimization)

There have been a few signs that this transition is occurring (e.g. bus/train locator on cell phones), but to be successful, they have to do a lot more work to make the service appealing to new potential users.

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That's cool for Dallas. I want to hate on big D as an adopted Houstonian I like it here so much more... but this is just gravy at this point for DART maybe they are looking at McKinney Ave Trolley and thinking today people for some reason like to ride an old trolley car even in a car obsessed city like Dallas.

Yes, Oak Cliff is not Uptown but it's pretty funky and gentrifying quickly. I have a friend who's mom lives there after 75 years and she said the new "white influx" is extremely strange.. From her mouth: when a white man used to come to my door it was either police or a bill collector; now I don't answer as it's another person trying to low-ball me for my house.

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I think it is more like "hope people for some reason like to ride an old trolley car even in a car obsessed city like Dallas." DART ridership is cratering, even as they open new lines. It has 85 miles of track, but ridership is barely over 70,000 per day. There is no reason to think a trolley in Oak Cliff will cure the light rail system's woes, though it might be nice for the people who live within a few blocks of it. And, to make matters worse, the federal money for the trolley was money that was going to be used to connect Love Field to the light rail system. So, instead of a useful rail/airport connector, They get a cute trolley in a historic district. That's kinda like cheering for a single when you needed a home run.